Victor Davis Hanson: Why are so many young people calling themselves socialists?
Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News “Socialist!” is no longer a McCarthyite slur. Rather, the fresh celebrity “Squad” of newly elected identity-politics congresswomen – Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.; and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; – often either claim to be socialists or embrace socialist ideas. A recent Harris poll showed that about half of so-called […]
The Mythical Trump Hydra
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Many are the hissing heads of the polycephalic Donald Trump—at least according to the progressive Left and the NeverTrump Right, who see the president of the United States as some sort of mythical nightmare. Here are a few of his supposedly monstrous manifestations. Trump, the Profiteer Candidate Trump never really wanted […]
Trump — or What, Exactly?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review In traditional political terms, there is always an alternate agenda to an incumbent president’s that reasonable voters can debate. In Trump’s case, two massive annual budget deficits — coming on top of the previous two administrations that doubled the national debt — seem fair game. No president for the […]
With The Old Breed
Victor Davis Hanson // Claremont Review of Books n the world of ancient Greece and Rome, collective reverence for the war dead helped explain why hoplites and legionaries fought so fiercely. The great themes of classical literature are often those of battlefield commemoration. Pericles’ majestic Funeral Oration, the lyric poet Simonides’ epitaph for the fallen […]
Progressive Democrats Renounce Their Former Selves
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review All politicians are “flexible.” If they are in politics long enough, many reinvent themselves ideologically several times over — given the perceived volatile mood of 51 percent of their constituency. But rarely have we seen an entire primary field of candidates scrambling to renounce all their past identities and […]
Victor Davis Hanson: What could sink Trump’s chances in 2020?
Victor Davis Hanson // Fox News What factors usually reelect or throw out incumbent presidents? The economy counts most. Recessions, or at least chronic economic pessimism, sink incumbents. Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were tagged with sluggish growth, high unemployment and a sense of perceived stagnation — and were easily defeated. The 2008 financial crisis likely ended any chance […]
Cosmic Injustice
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness One of the weirdest characteristics of our global politicians and moral censors is their preference to voice cosmic justice rather than to address less abstract sin within their own purview or authority. These progressive virtue mongers see themselves as citizens of the world rather than of the United States […]
The German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact: A Bad Deal, 80 Years Ago
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Some 80 years ago, on August 23, 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, formally known as the “Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” The world was shocked — and terrified — by the agreement. Western democracies of the […]
The Strange Case of ‘White Supremacy’
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Any majority population must be careful not to revert to pre-civilized tribalism and oppressing minority groups. The United States, like every other country that enjoys diverse populations has struggled from its beginning to ensure equality, sometimes unsuccessfully, and only at the cost of thousands of lives. While the United […]
How Robert O’Rourke Became ‘Beto’
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review A great deal of controversy has continued the past few days over Robert Francis O’Rourke’s longtime use of a nickname given to him at birth (albeit temporarily jettisoned while in prep school) — especially in the wake of his recent sensational and unfounded charges that Donald Trump is directly responsible […]
Why target Tucker Carlson? It’s part of the left’s war on the right
Victor Davis Hanson // The Hill The mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have rightly shocked the nation. In our understandable collective furor over the senseless loss of life, all the old political divides are being revisited, now in a climate of often frightening blame, anger and distrust — from gun control […]
Will 2020 Be a Repeat of 2004 for Democrats?
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Democrats by 2004 had become obsessed with defeating incumbent President George W. Bush. Four years earlier, in the 2000 election, Bush had won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. Democrats were still furious that Bush supposedly had been “selected” by the Supreme Court over the contested vote […]
Democrats’ Debate Cowardice, Hypocrisy, and Nuttiness
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Half of the Democratic 20-person primary field in the debates appeared unhappy, shrill, and self-righteous, and determined that no candidate should out-left any other. So far, they certainly sound clueless about how they sound to those in western Pennsylvania or southern Michigan. Their timidity also only accentuated rampant hypocrisy. […]
The Dream Team Loses to the Nobodies
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review When figurehead Robert Mueller likely allowed Andrew Weissman to form his special counsel team to investigate so-called charges of Russian collusion involving Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Kremlin, Washington elites became bouncy. The high-profile legal “powerhouse” lineup immediately looked like a sure-thing—an elite slaughter of the yokels. As […]
Menacing Invective Against Trump Creates Dangerous Climate
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Former vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden has bragged on two occasions that he would like to beat up President Donald Trump. In March 2018, Biden huffed, “They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, ‘If we were in […]
100 Years of the Hoover Institution
Victor Davis Hanson // National Review This year marks the centennial anniversary of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Or at least, in theory, it sort of does. In 1919 Herbert Hoover — then a 45-year-old multimillionaire, mining engineer, and veteran of efforts to save the starving of Europe and Russia following World War I […]
Woke Racism
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Well before Sigmund Freud formalized the idea of “projectionism”—the defense of one’s own shortcomings and sins by attributing them to others—it was a common theme in classical literature and the New Testament: the ridiculing of the mole on someone else’s nose to hide one’s own boil. The term projection […]
The Lessons of the Versailles Treaty
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness The Treaty of Versailles was signed in Versailles, France, on June 28, 1919. Neither the winners nor the losers of World War I were happy with the formal conclusion to the bloodbath. The traditional criticism of the treaty is that the victorious French and British democracies did not listen […]
The Economy, Father of Us All
Victor Davis Hanson // Nationals Review Each week we are warned of a recession. And each week the economic news “unexpectedly” and “surprisingly” improves or stays steady — in ways well aside from the staples of continued near-record-low peacetime unemployment (3.8 percent), near-record-low minority unemployment, booming annualized GDP (3.1 percent), and a record-high stock market. […]
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness Get along? Apparently no—at least until after 2020. Two examples summarize why. “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice,” said U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), one-quarter of “the squad” sowing havoc among Democrats in the House. “ We don’t need black […]